Always nice to see another game decompiled like this. It's a big deal as far as laying the groundwork for possible ports to PC and other consoles is concerned, and will probably aid modders quite a bit.
If anyone needs a full list of these projects (which includes this one), there's a pretty good selection here:
I'm the author of ghidra-delinker-extension and these are not full lists of these projects. Here are some public projects that I'm aware of which aren't listed:
I've also been in discussion with people working on decompilation projects which are private. I won't share details, but it includes both well-known games and recent games (as in, built with link time optimizations).
The decompilation community is quite decentralized, with lots of Discord servers specific to one platform or a series of games. In the case of Windows it's also heavily fragmented, as there is no equivalent to community-standard tooling like splat or dtk-decomp for that platform, although my Ghidra extension has carved itself a niche in it.
I'd rather not post invite links here directly out of concern for spamming, but I can leave some easy-to-follow breadcrumbs.
The decomp.me Discord server invite link can be readily found on that website and in the README of its GitHub repository. It's the closest thing to a central hub of the decompilation community. You can find some invite links in its chat history by searching for "discord.gg" (including the servers listed below).
Some of these Discord servers have a #other-servers or #related-servers channel with tons of invite links to other similar Discord servers. In particular, these servers have those channels:
- PS1/PS2 Decompilation
- GC/Wii Decompilation
That way, you should be able to find dozens and dozens of Discord servers on that topic. There are still many more out there (I've joined at least six others that aren't directly reachable from the invite links inside the servers I've mentioned).
There are also other Discord servers about reverse-engineering that can contain discussions about decompilation techniques or projects.
I mostly don't use Discord, but I'm intrigued how this system works. If the invite link is already posted on the project website and the readme of a Github repository, why would putting it in a Hacker News comment risk spammers?
First, because personally I think it's bad etiquette to post an invite link publicly on large, open-access forums like Hacker News.
Second, because while the biggest decompilation Discord servers have effective moderation team and processes, the vast majority are just a server for a project from one or a couple of persons with <100 members joined. Such small servers don't have round-the-clock moderation or customized settings.
Third, because I regularly see phishing crypto spam posted in the smaller servers. Spreading invite links publicly carelessly increases the odds that these scammers find them and spam them.
The part I don't understand is how posting the link on HN is different from posting it on Github. I'm wondering for example if Github has some sort of extra bot protection HN does not, or if there's some cultural difference I'm not aware of or seeing.
Discord servers are more like a hangout place than a public forum and public invite links are like putting a key under a mat. Just because the owners of a Discord server put it on their public webpage or GitHub repository doesn't mean it's cool to spread it around willy-nilly.
There are also practical concerns. An invite link that needs to be deleted (for example due to spam abuse) means that it will no longer work. Updating all the places where that old link appeared to the new one can be impractical or impossible.
HN isn't a good place to share Discord invite links. I'd recommend putting an email address (or something) in your bio – ideally one you don't mind getting spammed – so people can send such things to you semi-privately.
I've been experimenting with AI in this space myself. Don't believe any of my projects are listed there but I posted an article some days back where I showcased static recompilers all playing at least one commercial game for the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Virtual Boy and Playstation. I actually just announced a playable build of Megaman X today that eliminates all its slowdowns.
Whether the broader communities will accept any of my work remains to be seek given the heavy correlation to those communities and anti AI sentiment.
given the heavy correlation to those communities and anti AI sentiment.
I've noticed the anti-AI sentiment is starting to die down. People are slowly realising that, along with the voluminous amounts of slop, there are others who have been able to leverage AI with much success.
You say that, but just today I showcased my Megaman X Recomp on a Megaman subreddit. I got harassed by a drive-by anti-AI cabal and then the moderators of the subreddit removed my submission after I reported the harassment, citing that AI was involved, and AI is theft.
One bizarre related thing I've noticed is often you will find people who otherwise seem ok with people violating the copyright and other various licenses by "decompiling" a game, but as soon as AI is involved suddenly it's a big controversial ethical issue... as if totally violating the authors rights is a minor inconvenience.
Libraries purchase books. One for every book they loan out at a time, digitally or physically.
The most recent noteworthy counter-example is archive.org breaching their "one purchase = one concurrent loan" limit during COVID, and they lost that court battle.
If you're equating libraries to LLMs, then every leading-model company would have purchased ~every book, newspaper, movie, and song in existence at least once. They have not.
Because libraries predate copyright and publishers and all the industry behind it. If libraries were to be invented nowadays, they won't let them purchase a single physical book to be enjoyed by several different physical persons over the course of time. What the publishing industry would like to have is 1 physical person = 1 or more physical copies, not the other way round.
Yeah, I may give a whirl to those subreddits, but it does really show the dissonance between a sect's visceral hatred of AI relative to their interests when they're rejecting the progress of a game on the game's own franchise's subreddit.
I've been off-and-on again. I stopped using it for years. I begrudgingly began using it again as I founded a private game server (before AI was viable, even, so it wasn't sued) for a game that shutdown a few years ago.
Perhaps hilariously, the moderators there also didn't like me and told me to eat shit when I suggested people start doing packet captures. At least they warmed up to me over the years though and actually endorse the project now.
Doesn't make the rest of the website any less of a cesspool though.
That's a pretty valid viewpoint, honestly. Unless the AI is open weights and free of charge it's using human effort that nobody paid for to do a commercial thing.
I would make the argument that open weights models are ethically still maybe questionable, but at least it's making the output a public good
The counterpoint is that every company ever has based themselves on human effort they never paid for (usually). The entire scientific endeavour for example. Standing on the shoulders of giants and so on.
Depends on the community. From my experience, the modding scenes for certain more recent games seem abivalent about it, or more willing to tolerate it, while the communities for modding older games tend to be more heavily against it.
For example, when a Paper Mario decomp/port used AI, the subreddit for the series pretty much tore it to shreds for that. Mario fan communities in general tend to be really heavily against it, with Mario Fan Games Galaxy, SMW Central, and SMBX having rules which are basically "no AI allowed for submissions ever".
Meanwhile my experience on sites like ROM Hacking.net is that AI is more accepted/tolerated there.
So, it's very much a series by series thing. Best to check what the Mega Man community thinks of LLMs before you post it.
When people work for an insanely difficult project for more than 2 years, they probably pick something they personally love and don't need any external request.
As someone who reverse engineers games for fun and preservation, I would personally be more than happy to take an external request. With compensation, of course. Maybe not so much if it's the "do hundreds to thousands of hours of highly specialised labour for free" kind of request :)
What is the current SOTA in terms of tools? How are these tools being used with LLMs to speed up decompilation?
My current wishlist is to decomp Elite CGA version (tiny x86 binary) back into assembler and annotating all the method names, vars etc. That way I could swap out some of the inner loop using knowledge that has been uncovered in the last 40 years of optimizations.
These models are getting crazy good at examining things like core dumps and disassembly. I've been using an agent to write compiler logic, and its amazing the kind results you can get by having the agent examine the raw binary outputs. I would not be surprised to see agents excel at identifying and labeling patterns for decompilation.
I transcribed several pieces from a public-domain orchestral score of Swan Lake and uploaded them to Musescore's web site. This would have been ~dozens of hours of work. (For me, starting with almost no relevant training.)
I did this because those particular pieces were significant to me.
But I attracted the attention of another user who wanted to see more public-domain orchestral music on the site, and who contacted me to ask if I was planning to do the entire ballet (no; it's about 600 pages) and if I would take requests.
I responded that I was happy to take requests but wouldn't guarantee that I'd do any work on them. He requested Tchaikovsky's Italian Capriccio, which was a decent guess as to what I might be willing to transcribe (it's the same author)... but I looked into it, listened to the music, and just couldn't muster the enthusiasm to keep working on it.
So yeah, a request might work, but it's only likely to work if you happen to make an excellent guess about what the person would have wanted to do anyway. Think of it like drawing someone's attention to something.
Like OP, I've learned at lot in this process. I have versions running in the browser now with a custom WebGPU rendering engine. Still lots of jank and vibes, but it's wild to see what models are capable of with the right tooling. (I've had Claude add extensions into Ghidra for Xbox/Wii specific instruction support)
Wild times we're living in. It's great for software preservation though!
I love stories like this. I used Claude to decompile an old Windows program and port it to Linux, it was extremely challenging, I had a lot of success but ended up just rewriting it as a new app.
As someone who has done RE for decades, I feel like I've been seeing a lot of new decompilation projects recently, but even before the rise of AI. Possibly correlated with the release of Ghidra? Either way, it's great to see and perhaps a sign of a greater trend.
Controversial opinion: I think the FOSS movement was a setback and distraction from attaining software freedom as well as giving an undeserved negative reputation to "reverse-engineering" in some areas. RMS had the right idea, but missed the mark when it came to practical application by focusing far too much on "source code". Other industries have long been making third-party parts by merely inspecting existing ones with measuring tools, and let's not forget the whole discipline of scientific research is largely what amounts to "reverse-engineering" the natural world. You don't need the original source code if you have good decompilers, and now LLMs to assist.
Decompiling a binary, finding what you need to change, and then patching precisely that piece, seems like a far more liberating process than getting the source code, figuring out how to build it in its entirety, and possibly changing more than only the piece you wanted to. Many years ago, I remember coming across a few Java utilities that were public-domain but not open-source, and the author explicitly told users that they were to use a Java decompiler to decompile, edit, and recompile if they wanted to make any changes.
My personal opinion is that the very concept of IP misses the mark. “Property” requires scarcity. If I use something, it means someone else can’t use that thing. When I use a house for living, others are unable to do so. When I consume food or water, others people can’t do so.
Ideas aren’t scarce. Someone who reads a book, or looks at a picture, or makes use of a copy of software is not preventing other people from doing so. The idea that an idea can be restricted are given exclusive use to one particular party for any amount of time by law, is dystopic.
RMS is explicitly about FOSS and not just open source (in the sense of source available).
> You don't need the original source code if you have good decompilers, and now LLMs to assist.
Yes, you do. Decompiling and modifying a binary can be illegal itself under the DMCA in certain circumstances. But even if it is not, distributing the decompiled source is against copyright.
> Java utilities that were public-domain but not open-source
AFAIK Java is specifically easy to decompile when it is not further obfuscated. That is not true for many other languages. And while you can technically reverse engineer any language it does make modifying software and even finding out what it does fundamentally more difficult.
> far more liberating process than getting the source code, figuring out how to build it in its entirety, and possibly changing more than only the piece you wanted to.
It's certainly more liberating because there are more restrictions you have to liberate from in the first place. RMS argues that these restrictions should not exist in the first place. As for building being difficult, no free license requires the author to use a good and easy build procedure, but the GPL requires them to provide you all the tools required to build the software unless they are already readily available: "The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities."
Decompiling and modifying a binary can be illegal itself under the DMCA in certain circumstances.
...and so is going over the speed limit.
Practically? Who gives a flying fuck.
PC magazines in the late 80s and early 90s told people how to patch binaries to fix bugs or enhance functionality, with lists of offsets and bytes. Without distributing the original, so no copyright issues there. I don't think anyone tried to go after them because they'd be fighting the 1st Amendment.
This is what the internet is for. I only remember playing this game once or twice on a friend's N64, so I don't have any nostalgia for it, but the idea that someone chose this as their strange, impractical personal project is really satisfying.
I agree with you but I’d say the internet is just an enabler for this. It’s the humans who are cool and they even built an entire planetary network to share their cooliness.
These decomp projects are amazing. Comparing playing Twilight Princess in Dolphin (which is already an impressive feat of engineering) versus the Dusklight decompilation, it's like night and day.
I'm also really looking forward to trying the Dinosaur Planet decomp, because the prototype ROM from which it was derived has a tendency to crash the various libretro cores/N64 emulators I've tried.
I've done a similar project before (taking an NES game I like, disassembling it, and doing a PC port). For me, the attraction is being able to make an ideal version of a game I like, with bugfixes, quality of life improvements, added polish, and not having to deal with hardware restrictions from old consoles. The amount of effort involved doesn't really make sense unless it's something you deeply care about, which is why most commercial rereleases of old games are emulated instead of this sort of improved native port.
Why not? Many folks feel an itch to play a certain nostalgic game that few others enjoyed. And they want to make it even better, especially as our expectations have grown over time.
I prefer 1080 as snowboarding games go. Though must admit some fondness for Cool Boarders and a selection of other lower quality games that few will admit to enjoying.
Decomp tools for N64 have had some breakthroughs even before AI. Now I imagine it's even better. If that facilitates folks geeking out with their favorite guilty pleasure then so be it!
1080 is good but feels more like a sim than SKII. The Mario Kart vibes of SKII really help with its replayability. And the absolutely comical situations that happen at the lift in SKII
I can only speak for myself but my brain was the Wild West when I was a kid. There was no canon for it to draw on in terms of how or why things were the way they were and this especially applied to creative pursuits like TV shows, movies, music, and video games. I had all sorts of insane ideas about how cool it'd be to implement certain mechanics, characters, etc. in games I played but this was, of course, virtually impossible at the time. Decompilation paves a reliable path to this type of experimentation - see all of the ridiculous SM64 and Goldeneye mods that are available now (with demos on YouTube).
im not going to post with as much confidence as your many other replies ... but this is like one of the rarest nintendo games ... maybe that has something to do with it
This is sort of the explanation I was looking for. So I've learned this is a pretty good snowboard sim and that people really love it, but those aren't as enticing factors as the game just being hard to find. N64 emulation is still not really there and probably never will be so a decomp makes sense.
Before LLMs made these sorts of Sisyphean coding tasks tractable for normal people, there was IRC and Discord, where people with a special interest in programming and emulation could be egged on by the people who delight in the memes. I guess another POV is, were the special interest people and the meme lords ever really friends? If you don't understand what I'm talking about, you aren't really thinking deeply enough about how and why these sorts of things actually get made. A sense of "community" no doubt.
There are idea guys that thought it was funny to decompile an obscure N64 game with little cultural and nostalgic attention, and they found themselves at the intersection of special interest doers which they could egg on into doing it?
More I am just confused for why the game was chosen. SM64, Zelda OoT for example I could easily understand the community motivations behind decompiling. This not so much, which makes the whole endeavor even cooler.
These games are less niche than you think. I for one played way more Snowboard Kids than SM64.
The other factor to consider is OoT and SM64 are Nintendo properties. Nintendo is one of the most litigious companies in the industry. That alone may shift people away from some of those big name titles owned by them.
You lumping together IRC and Discord seems bizarre to me.
I'm not sure "community" was always the reason, but we might be talking about different eras. Back in the late 90s and early 00s there were the pioneering scenes for modding, emulation, fan subs, remakes, etc. and it was all highly competitive.
I don't mean to shit on anyone's legacy, but it seemed more ego driven and like there was something to prove either personally or politically. It was cultural and maybe even spiritual. Anyone working on this stuff felt powerful. Nearly a century of broadcast media and being told what to do and how feel by people from far away was ending. Disassembly felt more like deconstruction. It didn't feel like love. It was hacking. There's a reason why one can still shout "hack the planet!" into a crowd of nerds and get them to instantly light up.
I'm not even saying all this as an old fart. Things just changed so fast since then. I'm in my 30s.
I'm currently working in a cool hardware project (an "audiogame console" in a stealthy form factor), and I when I read this I had to go through the rabbit hole of comparing the hardware of the N64 with what I'm planning to use, an inexpensive ESP32-P4. It was nice to learn that the RSP in the N64 is similar to the RISCVs in the present-day MCU, with 128-bits wide SIMD. Most of my experience with numeric computing has been using at least 64 bits floating point; can't wait to shoot my foot many times with int16.
The decomp dev guys are doing amazing work. It's also super educational too, if you're someone like me who's in just doing relatively simple AI / python / typescript work and rarely has to think about memory, hardware constraints, all that, it's a completely different world.
Also, AI is finally getting to the point where it can do very difficult decompilation work, which is super exciting to me.
It really is crazy. I have been contributing the Melee decompilation project for the past year-ish, and things have really accelerated in 2026. Just today I decided it would be nice to have a better "permuter" (program that randomly modifies C in the hopes of finding a better asm match) so I...just asked Claude to make one, custom-tailored to my needs. It almost feels pointless to publish it to GitHub when I can just tell the other contributors "hey fyi you can ask Claude to make you a better permuter"
I'm not that interested in the game much, but I really like how the repo with the Claude things is set up and the wording. I’ll use some of it in my projects. It’s well balanced IMO, includes all the important details, tools, and scripts, but not excessively wordy.
Awe, why I love hacker news. This game was my childhood! I played it again recently on an emulator and was astounded how much easier it was. Made it to Damian without losing a single race. That seemed impossible at age 10.
Love to see the enthousiasm for Snowboard Kids. I thought it was more of a hidden gem that not many people know about. I played that game with friends so much when I was young. Never was able to get my hands on Snowboard Kids 2 as it was never in stores.
I understand the technical appeal of this effort, but wouldn't it be easier to try to obtain the original source code? Or has that been lost and all that's left is a blob?
Fundamentally, decompilation is not solving a technical problem most of the time (because the source already exists somewhere) but a social one (that the owner doesn't want to release it).
I wouldn't be surprised if the original source code is probably lost and forgotten in a ZIP drive stored in a basement somewhere in Tokyo.
I've made a similar point in an earlier comment, but consider the following:
Even if the original sources leaked in a human-readable format, the original game was probably written in a mixture of the device-specific dialect of the Mips R3000 assembly used by the Nintendo 64, whatever in-house assembler macro routines SGI provided for the RSP game-specific microcode, and some C89 glue code in an IDE like Metrowerks Codewarrior 4, by a team of overworked japanese developers in a hurry.
We can safely assume that the final decompiled code is way more readable/usable than the original.
You're probably right that it's forgotten and all, but..
> We can safely assume that the final decompiled code is way more readable/usable than the original.
Have you looked at any rediscovered repositories lately?
It's a pretty daft assumption that the original source code wouldn't carry more value than the decompiled machine-generated "source code". And much more so.
Certainly from the game historian's perspective. Just think about it. Inline comments, logs, scraps of documents/notes, variable/function naming, scrapped files and artwork, engine code, etc. These things are essentially a time capsule treasure and a peek into the history of the game, no matter their state.
If you've seen any rediscovered source code releases of old software, e.g. 86-DOS, Prince of Persia, Command & Conquer, Little Big Adventure, even Apollo or any of the "the making of"-style game releases built around it (Karateka, Ninja Turles) you'd probably think differently. These are super interesting to dive into because they capture the thoughts and decisions of the developers at the time.
I was lucky enough to speak with one of the guys who ported Final Fantasy VIII to Windows (A crazy talented guy from Naples and one of the earliest members of the OG playstation emulation scene) and the porting team of several IREM arcade shootemups to the Game boy advance (incidentally they were also from south Italy) and both of them told me the same story:
The source code they were given for the job was so specific to the assembler, compiler, build stack and internal company libraries and SDKs (which often they had no access to) that reverse engineering the final game was usually the quickest route.
> Certainly from the game historian's perspective.
That's a completely different topic, and I mean, sure - from an historical perspective it's absolutely essential, even simple changelogs become of enormous importance.
By that logic VPNs and many other technical solutions are also not solving technical problems, since it is theoretically possible to achieve the same results by other means.
> Wouldn't it be easier to try to obtain the original source code? Or has that been lost and all that's left is a blob?
Define easier? There is virtually no incentive for a game studio to release their original source code. Studios are running on already tight enough margins as it is with one lackluster release being enough to doom a company to oblivion.
Unless you have a method to completely reorient capitalism away from the idea of intellectual property then painstakingly reversing the C code from MIPS assembly will always be the easier path.
Remember too, that we are on Hacker News. Only a tiny sliver of the population, in some cases just one or two people, cares about the source code. Not worthwhile for a studio to release the code just to satisfy a couple of nerds. What is the upside? Unknown. Downsides? Numerous.
Almost all instances of source code being released have come from small studios or individuals who are ideologically motivated, and are otherwise independently successful. John Carmack / Id Software comes to mind.
> This is a game released in 1999. It's silly that source code isn't released for games this old.
Completely agreed. But even if the will was there, how do we know the source code even exists? 1999 was a long time ago. Source code is company IP. Generally it's the devs who write it and care enough to want to release it to the masses or archive it properly. But they are not the decision makers. There are too many stories of source code quite literally disappearing despite the devs best efforts. A lot of the times when we do get access to source code it comes from rogue behavior aka a former dev putting their ass on the line for the community (see the recent MGS leak on 4chan).
Also like a sibling comment has stated there is no guarantee that the code would be a in a usable format. With the crazy crunch culture in game dev, I doubt most of these studios from the 90s were pumping out clean code. Like an archaeology dig, you'd have to budget a non-trivial amount of time getting what you find in a state that is useable by modern standards.
All to say, I think reversing these older games is a worthy endeavor that is not going away anytime soon. I for one, am excited by the productivity benefits that AI tools have brought with them.
With these old games sometimes the source is just lost. I used to work with a guy who wrote Brian the Lion(the Amiga game) and he always says he wishes he still had the source code for it. We've also looked briefly at the source code of Driver, and the only one in company archives was not the final version. There were 2 revisions after that one but no one has a copy of those. And then we pulled a bunch of old CDs with assets and code burnt back in 1990s and about 50% were unreadable already, god knows what exactly was on them.
Great and all, but what about the legality of it all?
It wouldn't be the first time that a decompilation project gets shut down.
Reverse engineering is (luckily) OK, but reproducing (or, well, releasing) the actual original code with the help of decompilation isn't really allowed, is it?
I mean if you look at the N64 catalog at the time when Goldeneye was released then yeah maybe. Looking at the N64 catalog as a whole I'd rank Perfect Dark above Goldeneye in the shooter category. The singleplayer that allowed split screen co-op, the many modes and bots in multiplayer. So much time was spent in that game.
I think at one point in the future we can do a one-shot decompilation with one of the SOTA LLM models.
Always nice to see another game decompiled like this. It's a big deal as far as laying the groundwork for possible ports to PC and other consoles is concerned, and will probably aid modders quite a bit.
If anyone needs a full list of these projects (which includes this one), there's a pretty good selection here:
https://decomp.dev/projects
Though these may have a few they missed:
https://readonlymemo.com/decompilation-projects-and-n64-reco...
https://github.com/CharlotteCross1998/awesome-game-decompila...
I'm the author of ghidra-delinker-extension and these are not full lists of these projects. Here are some public projects that I'm aware of which aren't listed:
- Moon Lights 2: https://github.com/Armonte/ml2decomp
- F-15 Strike Eagle II: https://github.com/neuviemeporte/f15se2-re
I've also been in discussion with people working on decompilation projects which are private. I won't share details, but it includes both well-known games and recent games (as in, built with link time optimizations).
The decompilation community is quite decentralized, with lots of Discord servers specific to one platform or a series of games. In the case of Windows it's also heavily fragmented, as there is no equivalent to community-standard tooling like splat or dtk-decomp for that platform, although my Ghidra extension has carved itself a niche in it.
Sorry to ask this, but are there any discord links you can share?
I'd rather not post invite links here directly out of concern for spamming, but I can leave some easy-to-follow breadcrumbs.
The decomp.me Discord server invite link can be readily found on that website and in the README of its GitHub repository. It's the closest thing to a central hub of the decompilation community. You can find some invite links in its chat history by searching for "discord.gg" (including the servers listed below).
Some of these Discord servers have a #other-servers or #related-servers channel with tons of invite links to other similar Discord servers. In particular, these servers have those channels:
- PS1/PS2 Decompilation
- GC/Wii Decompilation
That way, you should be able to find dozens and dozens of Discord servers on that topic. There are still many more out there (I've joined at least six others that aren't directly reachable from the invite links inside the servers I've mentioned).
There are also other Discord servers about reverse-engineering that can contain discussions about decompilation techniques or projects.
I mostly don't use Discord, but I'm intrigued how this system works. If the invite link is already posted on the project website and the readme of a Github repository, why would putting it in a Hacker News comment risk spammers?
First, because personally I think it's bad etiquette to post an invite link publicly on large, open-access forums like Hacker News.
Second, because while the biggest decompilation Discord servers have effective moderation team and processes, the vast majority are just a server for a project from one or a couple of persons with <100 members joined. Such small servers don't have round-the-clock moderation or customized settings.
Third, because I regularly see phishing crypto spam posted in the smaller servers. Spreading invite links publicly carelessly increases the odds that these scammers find them and spam them.
The part I don't understand is how posting the link on HN is different from posting it on Github. I'm wondering for example if Github has some sort of extra bot protection HN does not, or if there's some cultural difference I'm not aware of or seeing.
Discord servers are more like a hangout place than a public forum and public invite links are like putting a key under a mat. Just because the owners of a Discord server put it on their public webpage or GitHub repository doesn't mean it's cool to spread it around willy-nilly.
There are also practical concerns. An invite link that needs to be deleted (for example due to spam abuse) means that it will no longer work. Updating all the places where that old link appeared to the new one can be impractical or impossible.
Thanks a lot!
HN isn't a good place to share Discord invite links. I'd recommend putting an email address (or something) in your bio – ideally one you don't mind getting spammed – so people can send such things to you semi-privately.
I've been experimenting with AI in this space myself. Don't believe any of my projects are listed there but I posted an article some days back where I showcased static recompilers all playing at least one commercial game for the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Virtual Boy and Playstation. I actually just announced a playable build of Megaman X today that eliminates all its slowdowns.
Whether the broader communities will accept any of my work remains to be seek given the heavy correlation to those communities and anti AI sentiment.
given the heavy correlation to those communities and anti AI sentiment.
I've noticed the anti-AI sentiment is starting to die down. People are slowly realising that, along with the voluminous amounts of slop, there are others who have been able to leverage AI with much success.
> I've noticed the anti-AI sentiment is starting to die down.
I've noticed the opposite. Seems that it depends on where you're looking and what you're looking for.
You say that, but just today I showcased my Megaman X Recomp on a Megaman subreddit. I got harassed by a drive-by anti-AI cabal and then the moderators of the subreddit removed my submission after I reported the harassment, citing that AI was involved, and AI is theft.
One bizarre related thing I've noticed is often you will find people who otherwise seem ok with people violating the copyright and other various licenses by "decompiling" a game, but as soon as AI is involved suddenly it's a big controversial ethical issue... as if totally violating the authors rights is a minor inconvenience.
"AI is theft" --- just like every human who reads a book borrowed from the library or consumed any other media in their lives?
Reddit has a few pro-AI subreddits too, so you might find a better audience there.
Libraries purchase books. One for every book they loan out at a time, digitally or physically.
The most recent noteworthy counter-example is archive.org breaching their "one purchase = one concurrent loan" limit during COVID, and they lost that court battle.
If you're equating libraries to LLMs, then every leading-model company would have purchased ~every book, newspaper, movie, and song in existence at least once. They have not.
Because libraries predate copyright and publishers and all the industry behind it. If libraries were to be invented nowadays, they won't let them purchase a single physical book to be enjoyed by several different physical persons over the course of time. What the publishing industry would like to have is 1 physical person = 1 or more physical copies, not the other way round.
Yeah, I may give a whirl to those subreddits, but it does really show the dissonance between a sect's visceral hatred of AI relative to their interests when they're rejecting the progress of a game on the game's own franchise's subreddit.
big reason why i stopped using reddit
I've been off-and-on again. I stopped using it for years. I begrudgingly began using it again as I founded a private game server (before AI was viable, even, so it wasn't sued) for a game that shutdown a few years ago. Perhaps hilariously, the moderators there also didn't like me and told me to eat shit when I suggested people start doing packet captures. At least they warmed up to me over the years though and actually endorse the project now. Doesn't make the rest of the website any less of a cesspool though.
That's a pretty valid viewpoint, honestly. Unless the AI is open weights and free of charge it's using human effort that nobody paid for to do a commercial thing.
I would make the argument that open weights models are ethically still maybe questionable, but at least it's making the output a public good
The counterpoint is that every company ever has based themselves on human effort they never paid for (usually). The entire scientific endeavour for example. Standing on the shoulders of giants and so on.
Depends on the community. From my experience, the modding scenes for certain more recent games seem abivalent about it, or more willing to tolerate it, while the communities for modding older games tend to be more heavily against it.
For example, when a Paper Mario decomp/port used AI, the subreddit for the series pretty much tore it to shreds for that. Mario fan communities in general tend to be really heavily against it, with Mario Fan Games Galaxy, SMW Central, and SMBX having rules which are basically "no AI allowed for submissions ever".
Meanwhile my experience on sites like ROM Hacking.net is that AI is more accepted/tolerated there.
So, it's very much a series by series thing. Best to check what the Mega Man community thinks of LLMs before you post it.
That page absolutely fills me with hope. I don't see some of my cherished childhood games in there. I should start a decompilation project for them...
Any idea if there's a place where we can request games for decompilation?
I see that one for Burnout Paradise is in the works, but I would love one for Burnout Revenge.
When people work for an insanely difficult project for more than 2 years, they probably pick something they personally love and don't need any external request.
As someone who reverse engineers games for fun and preservation, I would personally be more than happy to take an external request. With compensation, of course. Maybe not so much if it's the "do hundreds to thousands of hours of highly specialised labour for free" kind of request :)
What is the current SOTA in terms of tools? How are these tools being used with LLMs to speed up decompilation?
My current wishlist is to decomp Elite CGA version (tiny x86 binary) back into assembler and annotating all the method names, vars etc. That way I could swap out some of the inner loop using knowledge that has been uncovered in the last 40 years of optimizations.
These models are getting crazy good at examining things like core dumps and disassembly. I've been using an agent to write compiler logic, and its amazing the kind results you can get by having the agent examine the raw binary outputs. I would not be surprised to see agents excel at identifying and labeling patterns for decompilation.
I transcribed several pieces from a public-domain orchestral score of Swan Lake and uploaded them to Musescore's web site. This would have been ~dozens of hours of work. (For me, starting with almost no relevant training.)
I did this because those particular pieces were significant to me.
But I attracted the attention of another user who wanted to see more public-domain orchestral music on the site, and who contacted me to ask if I was planning to do the entire ballet (no; it's about 600 pages) and if I would take requests.
I responded that I was happy to take requests but wouldn't guarantee that I'd do any work on them. He requested Tchaikovsky's Italian Capriccio, which was a decent guess as to what I might be willing to transcribe (it's the same author)... but I looked into it, listened to the music, and just couldn't muster the enthusiasm to keep working on it.
So yeah, a request might work, but it's only likely to work if you happen to make an excellent guess about what the person would have wanted to do anyway. Think of it like drawing someone's attention to something.
I've been working on porting Rock Band 3 and Dance Central 3 to PC via AI assisted decompilation. The repos are on my GitHub (https://github.com/freeqaz/rb3 and https://github.com/freeqaz/dc3-decomp)
Like OP, I've learned at lot in this process. I have versions running in the browser now with a custom WebGPU rendering engine. Still lots of jank and vibes, but it's wild to see what models are capable of with the right tooling. (I've had Claude add extensions into Ghidra for Xbox/Wii specific instruction support)
Wild times we're living in. It's great for software preservation though!
I love stories like this. I used Claude to decompile an old Windows program and port it to Linux, it was extremely challenging, I had a lot of success but ended up just rewriting it as a new app.
As someone who has done RE for decades, I feel like I've been seeing a lot of new decompilation projects recently, but even before the rise of AI. Possibly correlated with the release of Ghidra? Either way, it's great to see and perhaps a sign of a greater trend.
Controversial opinion: I think the FOSS movement was a setback and distraction from attaining software freedom as well as giving an undeserved negative reputation to "reverse-engineering" in some areas. RMS had the right idea, but missed the mark when it came to practical application by focusing far too much on "source code". Other industries have long been making third-party parts by merely inspecting existing ones with measuring tools, and let's not forget the whole discipline of scientific research is largely what amounts to "reverse-engineering" the natural world. You don't need the original source code if you have good decompilers, and now LLMs to assist.
Decompiling a binary, finding what you need to change, and then patching precisely that piece, seems like a far more liberating process than getting the source code, figuring out how to build it in its entirety, and possibly changing more than only the piece you wanted to. Many years ago, I remember coming across a few Java utilities that were public-domain but not open-source, and the author explicitly told users that they were to use a Java decompiler to decompile, edit, and recompile if they wanted to make any changes.
My personal opinion is that the very concept of IP misses the mark. “Property” requires scarcity. If I use something, it means someone else can’t use that thing. When I use a house for living, others are unable to do so. When I consume food or water, others people can’t do so.
Ideas aren’t scarce. Someone who reads a book, or looks at a picture, or makes use of a copy of software is not preventing other people from doing so. The idea that an idea can be restricted are given exclusive use to one particular party for any amount of time by law, is dystopic.
RMS is explicitly about FOSS and not just open source (in the sense of source available).
> You don't need the original source code if you have good decompilers, and now LLMs to assist.
Yes, you do. Decompiling and modifying a binary can be illegal itself under the DMCA in certain circumstances. But even if it is not, distributing the decompiled source is against copyright.
> Java utilities that were public-domain but not open-source
AFAIK Java is specifically easy to decompile when it is not further obfuscated. That is not true for many other languages. And while you can technically reverse engineer any language it does make modifying software and even finding out what it does fundamentally more difficult.
> far more liberating process than getting the source code, figuring out how to build it in its entirety, and possibly changing more than only the piece you wanted to.
It's certainly more liberating because there are more restrictions you have to liberate from in the first place. RMS argues that these restrictions should not exist in the first place. As for building being difficult, no free license requires the author to use a good and easy build procedure, but the GPL requires them to provide you all the tools required to build the software unless they are already readily available: "The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities."
Decompiling and modifying a binary can be illegal itself under the DMCA in certain circumstances.
...and so is going over the speed limit.
Practically? Who gives a flying fuck.
PC magazines in the late 80s and early 90s told people how to patch binaries to fix bugs or enhance functionality, with lists of offsets and bytes. Without distributing the original, so no copyright issues there. I don't think anyone tried to go after them because they'd be fighting the 1st Amendment.
That was before you could go to jail over that.
> I don't think anyone tried to go after them because they'd be fighting the 1st Amendment.
I have bad news for you:
https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq#fo...
Once again, no one gives a shit what you do with the bits on your own hard drive.
Decompilation allows to fork, but scaling the fork and making it maintenable on a long time scale is a technical challenge.
The FSF succeeded at changing the mindset towards more collaboration.
I agree that this also allowed to divert efforts from research on reverse engineering tooling by reducing the needs.
But AI is game changer for reverse engineering, so no secrets will be hidden in binaries.
In a way, this is a merge of an alternate branch of history where RE would be more powerful.
This is what the internet is for. I only remember playing this game once or twice on a friend's N64, so I don't have any nostalgia for it, but the idea that someone chose this as their strange, impractical personal project is really satisfying.
I agree with you but I’d say the internet is just an enabler for this. It’s the humans who are cool and they even built an entire planetary network to share their cooliness.
I'm still so sad about the re3/reVC guys getting DMCA'd and then sued by Take2/Rockstar Games. It is the most impressive project I've seen so far.
Thankfully, once something is on the internet, it's here forever.
These decomp projects are amazing. Comparing playing Twilight Princess in Dolphin (which is already an impressive feat of engineering) versus the Dusklight decompilation, it's like night and day.
I'm also really looking forward to trying the Dinosaur Planet decomp, because the prototype ROM from which it was derived has a tendency to crash the various libretro cores/N64 emulators I've tried.
Awesome, but I always wondered why so much effort was put into decompiling this? Seems like a meme for meme's sake.
I've done a similar project before (taking an NES game I like, disassembling it, and doing a PC port). For me, the attraction is being able to make an ideal version of a game I like, with bugfixes, quality of life improvements, added polish, and not having to deal with hardware restrictions from old consoles. The amount of effort involved doesn't really make sense unless it's something you deeply care about, which is why most commercial rereleases of old games are emulated instead of this sort of improved native port.
What was the game?
The Wing of Madoola: https://www.infochunk.com/madoola/openmadoola.html
Why not? Many folks feel an itch to play a certain nostalgic game that few others enjoyed. And they want to make it even better, especially as our expectations have grown over time.
I prefer 1080 as snowboarding games go. Though must admit some fondness for Cool Boarders and a selection of other lower quality games that few will admit to enjoying.
Decomp tools for N64 have had some breakthroughs even before AI. Now I imagine it's even better. If that facilitates folks geeking out with their favorite guilty pleasure then so be it!
1080 is good but feels more like a sim than SKII. The Mario Kart vibes of SKII really help with its replayability. And the absolutely comical situations that happen at the lift in SKII
I can only speak for myself but my brain was the Wild West when I was a kid. There was no canon for it to draw on in terms of how or why things were the way they were and this especially applied to creative pursuits like TV shows, movies, music, and video games. I had all sorts of insane ideas about how cool it'd be to implement certain mechanics, characters, etc. in games I played but this was, of course, virtually impossible at the time. Decompilation paves a reliable path to this type of experimentation - see all of the ridiculous SM64 and Goldeneye mods that are available now (with demos on YouTube).
Snowboard Kids is an awesome game, not a meme at all.
Probably the best kart racer ever made.
Snowboard Kids was to Mario Kart 64 what Banjo Kazooie was to Mario 64
Can't be because Diddy Kong Racing exists ;)
They do it because they love the game and want to preserve it, and because they can. You don’t need another reason.
Why do we store books in libraries, or write history textbooks? It's about preservation (and curiosity too).
It was easily one of the best racing games on the system?
im not going to post with as much confidence as your many other replies ... but this is like one of the rarest nintendo games ... maybe that has something to do with it
This is sort of the explanation I was looking for. So I've learned this is a pretty good snowboard sim and that people really love it, but those aren't as enticing factors as the game just being hard to find. N64 emulation is still not really there and probably never will be so a decomp makes sense.
Before LLMs made these sorts of Sisyphean coding tasks tractable for normal people, there was IRC and Discord, where people with a special interest in programming and emulation could be egged on by the people who delight in the memes. I guess another POV is, were the special interest people and the meme lords ever really friends? If you don't understand what I'm talking about, you aren't really thinking deeply enough about how and why these sorts of things actually get made. A sense of "community" no doubt.
There are idea guys that thought it was funny to decompile an obscure N64 game with little cultural and nostalgic attention, and they found themselves at the intersection of special interest doers which they could egg on into doing it?
More I am just confused for why the game was chosen. SM64, Zelda OoT for example I could easily understand the community motivations behind decompiling. This not so much, which makes the whole endeavor even cooler.
These games are less niche than you think. I for one played way more Snowboard Kids than SM64.
The other factor to consider is OoT and SM64 are Nintendo properties. Nintendo is one of the most litigious companies in the industry. That alone may shift people away from some of those big name titles owned by them.
You lumping together IRC and Discord seems bizarre to me.
I'm not sure "community" was always the reason, but we might be talking about different eras. Back in the late 90s and early 00s there were the pioneering scenes for modding, emulation, fan subs, remakes, etc. and it was all highly competitive.
I don't mean to shit on anyone's legacy, but it seemed more ego driven and like there was something to prove either personally or politically. It was cultural and maybe even spiritual. Anyone working on this stuff felt powerful. Nearly a century of broadcast media and being told what to do and how feel by people from far away was ending. Disassembly felt more like deconstruction. It didn't feel like love. It was hacking. There's a reason why one can still shout "hack the planet!" into a crowd of nerds and get them to instantly light up.
I'm not even saying all this as an old fart. Things just changed so fast since then. I'm in my 30s.
I'm currently working in a cool hardware project (an "audiogame console" in a stealthy form factor), and I when I read this I had to go through the rabbit hole of comparing the hardware of the N64 with what I'm planning to use, an inexpensive ESP32-P4. It was nice to learn that the RSP in the N64 is similar to the RISCVs in the present-day MCU, with 128-bits wide SIMD. Most of my experience with numeric computing has been using at least 64 bits floating point; can't wait to shoot my foot many times with int16.
The decomp dev guys are doing amazing work. It's also super educational too, if you're someone like me who's in just doing relatively simple AI / python / typescript work and rarely has to think about memory, hardware constraints, all that, it's a completely different world. Also, AI is finally getting to the point where it can do very difficult decompilation work, which is super exciting to me.
It really is crazy. I have been contributing the Melee decompilation project for the past year-ish, and things have really accelerated in 2026. Just today I decided it would be nice to have a better "permuter" (program that randomly modifies C in the hopes of finding a better asm match) so I...just asked Claude to make one, custom-tailored to my needs. It almost feels pointless to publish it to GitHub when I can just tell the other contributors "hey fyi you can ask Claude to make you a better permuter"
The prompt and a couple samples is the source.
And having it actually tested
I'm not that interested in the game much, but I really like how the repo with the Claude things is set up and the wording. I’ll use some of it in my projects. It’s well balanced IMO, includes all the important details, tools, and scripts, but not excessively wordy.
[1] https://github.com/cdlewis/snowboardkids2-decomp/tree/main
Awe, why I love hacker news. This game was my childhood! I played it again recently on an emulator and was astounded how much easier it was. Made it to Damian without losing a single race. That seemed impossible at age 10.
It was a great game. I also play it on emulator now and then. I love the little fight to be the next on the ski lift after every lap.
Love to see the enthousiasm for Snowboard Kids. I thought it was more of a hidden gem that not many people know about. I played that game with friends so much when I was young. Never was able to get my hands on Snowboard Kids 2 as it was never in stores.
I'm so excited about this. My cousins and I still play Snowboard Kids (one) whenever we meet up.
How much have LLMs sped up these decompilations?
https://blog.chrislewis.au/the-long-tail-of-llm-assisted-dec... same author wrote about their process
Useful, but complements existing tooling & falls short on the hard part
I work on Ship of Harkinian. We're sering more vibed libultraship ports. Yet to see a real success
Massively, armed with the right tools you can tear apart old software now
Significantly. It also has sped up the ability to do recompilations, too.
This is the game to be decompiling in 2026. Many good memories.
I understand the technical appeal of this effort, but wouldn't it be easier to try to obtain the original source code? Or has that been lost and all that's left is a blob?
Fundamentally, decompilation is not solving a technical problem most of the time (because the source already exists somewhere) but a social one (that the owner doesn't want to release it).
I wouldn't be surprised if the original source code is probably lost and forgotten in a ZIP drive stored in a basement somewhere in Tokyo.
I've made a similar point in an earlier comment, but consider the following:
Even if the original sources leaked in a human-readable format, the original game was probably written in a mixture of the device-specific dialect of the Mips R3000 assembly used by the Nintendo 64, whatever in-house assembler macro routines SGI provided for the RSP game-specific microcode, and some C89 glue code in an IDE like Metrowerks Codewarrior 4, by a team of overworked japanese developers in a hurry.
We can safely assume that the final decompiled code is way more readable/usable than the original.
You're probably right that it's forgotten and all, but..
> We can safely assume that the final decompiled code is way more readable/usable than the original.
Have you looked at any rediscovered repositories lately?
It's a pretty daft assumption that the original source code wouldn't carry more value than the decompiled machine-generated "source code". And much more so.
Certainly from the game historian's perspective. Just think about it. Inline comments, logs, scraps of documents/notes, variable/function naming, scrapped files and artwork, engine code, etc. These things are essentially a time capsule treasure and a peek into the history of the game, no matter their state.
If you've seen any rediscovered source code releases of old software, e.g. 86-DOS, Prince of Persia, Command & Conquer, Little Big Adventure, even Apollo or any of the "the making of"-style game releases built around it (Karateka, Ninja Turles) you'd probably think differently. These are super interesting to dive into because they capture the thoughts and decisions of the developers at the time.
Here are also some interesting articles to showcase what that means: https://gamehistory.org/category/source-code/
I was lucky enough to speak with one of the guys who ported Final Fantasy VIII to Windows (A crazy talented guy from Naples and one of the earliest members of the OG playstation emulation scene) and the porting team of several IREM arcade shootemups to the Game boy advance (incidentally they were also from south Italy) and both of them told me the same story:
The source code they were given for the job was so specific to the assembler, compiler, build stack and internal company libraries and SDKs (which often they had no access to) that reverse engineering the final game was usually the quickest route.
> Certainly from the game historian's perspective.
That's a completely different topic, and I mean, sure - from an historical perspective it's absolutely essential, even simple changelogs become of enormous importance.
By that logic VPNs and many other technical solutions are also not solving technical problems, since it is theoretically possible to achieve the same results by other means.
> Wouldn't it be easier to try to obtain the original source code? Or has that been lost and all that's left is a blob?
Define easier? There is virtually no incentive for a game studio to release their original source code. Studios are running on already tight enough margins as it is with one lackluster release being enough to doom a company to oblivion.
Unless you have a method to completely reorient capitalism away from the idea of intellectual property then painstakingly reversing the C code from MIPS assembly will always be the easier path.
Remember too, that we are on Hacker News. Only a tiny sliver of the population, in some cases just one or two people, cares about the source code. Not worthwhile for a studio to release the code just to satisfy a couple of nerds. What is the upside? Unknown. Downsides? Numerous.
Almost all instances of source code being released have come from small studios or individuals who are ideologically motivated, and are otherwise independently successful. John Carmack / Id Software comes to mind.
This is a game released in 1999. It's silly that source code isn't released for games this old.
> This is a game released in 1999. It's silly that source code isn't released for games this old.
Completely agreed. But even if the will was there, how do we know the source code even exists? 1999 was a long time ago. Source code is company IP. Generally it's the devs who write it and care enough to want to release it to the masses or archive it properly. But they are not the decision makers. There are too many stories of source code quite literally disappearing despite the devs best efforts. A lot of the times when we do get access to source code it comes from rogue behavior aka a former dev putting their ass on the line for the community (see the recent MGS leak on 4chan).
Also like a sibling comment has stated there is no guarantee that the code would be a in a usable format. With the crazy crunch culture in game dev, I doubt most of these studios from the 90s were pumping out clean code. Like an archaeology dig, you'd have to budget a non-trivial amount of time getting what you find in a state that is useable by modern standards.
All to say, I think reversing these older games is a worthy endeavor that is not going away anytime soon. I for one, am excited by the productivity benefits that AI tools have brought with them.
And why would they? There isn't any incentive for the company to do that.
With these old games sometimes the source is just lost. I used to work with a guy who wrote Brian the Lion(the Amiga game) and he always says he wishes he still had the source code for it. We've also looked briefly at the source code of Driver, and the only one in company archives was not the final version. There were 2 revisions after that one but no one has a copy of those. And then we pulled a bunch of old CDs with assets and code burnt back in 1990s and about 50% were unreadable already, god knows what exactly was on them.
I'd love to do this for Mario Golf 64 but would run out of steam in like a week T_T
Funny enough there's actually a project in progress to decompile Mario Golf:
https://github.com/monde-lointain/mariogolf64
Great and all, but what about the legality of it all? It wouldn't be the first time that a decompilation project gets shut down.
Reverse engineering is (luckily) OK, but reproducing (or, well, releasing) the actual original code with the help of decompilation isn't really allowed, is it?
>n64s greatest game.
HEY, it was a GREAT game, but GREATEST? COME ON, this ain't no goldeneye
Yeah, Double-Oh-Seven reigns supreme on the N64. And Bomberman, of course.
Did he stutter? SBK2 is #1 and it a'int close.
I mean if you look at the N64 catalog at the time when Goldeneye was released then yeah maybe. Looking at the N64 catalog as a whole I'd rank Perfect Dark above Goldeneye in the shooter category. The singleplayer that allowed split screen co-op, the many modes and bots in multiplayer. So much time was spent in that game.
What a strange way to spell Zelda Ocarina of Time!
Was recently discussing N64 games with friends in Japan. Nobody here knew Goldeneye.